


The Sword of Prince Hector

by englishable



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Depression, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, F/M, Rape/Non-con Elements, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-09
Updated: 2016-04-29
Packaged: 2018-06-01 03:38:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6499309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishable/pseuds/englishable
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kylo Ren - or whoever he thinks he is, the popular opinion runs, it won't change what he's done anyway - returns to the Light. He does not receive a warm welcome, not that he ever expected one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Ajax

**Author's Note:**

> This prompt is not my usual fare, although it speaks to certain points I’ve been discussing lately and have written about in the past. The first part of it, and coming from someone who probably loves this character as much as I do, reads as follows – 
> 
> _“Kylo has returned to the Light Side and Leia has decreed that he won’t be executed. Certain people within the Resistance are very angry that he’s been ‘let off easy.’ They really, really want him to suffer and die, but they can’t do anything about it openly. So they decide to drive him to the point where he does it for them.”_
> 
> The remainder of the prompt cited psychological abuse, sexual abuse, and suicidal ideation, eventually culminating in Kylo's - Ben's, rather - decision that perhaps he isn't worthy of redemption and forgiveness after all. 
> 
> Overall it hit me like an actual fist in the heart: which is always something that tells me I need to try and put it into words, although the final resolution was left up to the filler to decide. Please let me know immediately if anything else requires tagging or warnings.  
> 

...  
  
_"Yet now, grown sane, new misery is his;_  
_For on woes self-wrought he gazes aghast_  
_Wherein no hand but his own had share;_  
_And with anguish is his soul afflicted."_

...  
  
A lifetime spent mostly inside the minds of other people, or else listening to another voice inside his own, has given Ben a philosophically suspicious eye for anything that has been previously deemed impossible – still, he must try very hard not to look surprised while the judge delivers his sentence.   
  
“Kylo Ren,” he says, leaning forward in his stately chair, “it may interest you to know that there are many sane, law-abiding citizens within this republic who’ve informed me you should be chained to a pillar and whipped until death. Now, tell me, would you call that justice?”

  
“I would,” Ben answers, although the judge has not yet addressed him by name. Standing beside him, Leia frowns, and so he adds as a somewhat stale afterthought, “your honor.”  
  
“But we are not going to exercise justice today, Kylo Ren. I think I’ve seen enough blind justice practiced to fill a lifetime or two already – so in light of General Organa’s eloquent testimony, and your somewhat belated contribution to the First Order’s downfall, this high court has chosen instead to move in favor of mercy. What’s the difference between those two ideas, do you suppose?”  
  
Ben licks his cracked-dry lips. He holds both knees locked so that they will not give out beneath him, keeps his eyes aimed levelly forward, and he suddenly aches along the still-healing pathways his dead master’s lightning had taken as it scorched through his body. These trousers his mother has procured for him are a half-inch too short at the ankles, not that she could be expected to know any better.  
  
“Mercy cannot be earned,” he answers.   
  
“No, it cannot.” The judge settles back again, regarding him with the patient, hooded interest of a vulture. “You are living strictly on unmerited time – never forget that for an instant.”   
  
“I don't intend to.”  
  
The terms of his probation take a full half-hour to read, framed at both ends by the condition that any violation will result in an immediate reinstatement of his capital sentence. Afterwards Rey hurries him along an empty corridor towards the private upper flight deck – she never walks with her back toward him, a habit for which Ben cannot fault her, and a hum of anticipation surrounds her at every corner they turn – as shouts from the impatient crowd outside reach his ears.   
  
Ben halts before a window to listen.   
  
“How can we possibly expect to have peace while that murderer’s still alive? Don’t they understand what he’s done?” The stranger’s face has gone florid with a bellowing, breathless rage. The courthouse spokesperson looks pale by contrast, and Ben guesses they drew straws to decide who would relay this displeasing news. “Butcher him like the animal he is – it’d be a better death than he gave his father.”  
  
"If he were really a changed man, he'd ask that prig of a judge to let the death sentence stand. That's my opinion, anyhow."  
  
"See, that's right. That's exactly what I was saying before."

“Death sentence? Why should anybody else dirty their hands for that bastard’s sake? If he were any sort of man at all, he’d do the job himself.”

  
“Cut off his limbs first,” a woman hollers. “If he really wants to be Lord Vader so much, I’m sure he’d thank you for it.”  
  
This sends a wave of laughter rolling up the tall stone pillars. Ben notes that the woman has a young child balanced on her hip, who glances blankly upward and pops five soggy little fingers out of its mouth to wave at him.   
  
“I’m rather sorry to have disappointed them,” Ben comments. “The press could’ve called it the historical event of a generation, for a week or so.”  
  
“Well, now they’ll just have to find something else they can brag about witnessing.” Rey peers down as well, squinting into the afternoon sun, and then points to a large ATS septic tank on the courthouse roof. “If it’s drama they want, though, I can probably make that thing explode if I think about it hard enough – then they can all claim they were there that one miraculous day when it rained shit. How would they like that, you think?”   
  
“You truly are a consummate disciple of the sacred arts, Master.”   
  
She snorts. The child has gone on waving, so Ben moves to raise his hand in recognition. It seems like the least he can do for these frustrated spectators, who have come out expecting a celebratory execution and have instead been handed some maudlin, wildly implausible explanation about second chances.   
  
(Kylo Ren – they will always call him Kylo Ren, he knows, and so he will always be Kylo Ren, though he might tell them it was a won title rather than an actual name – does not truly believe in this himself, but saying such a thing aloud would be foolish. What had he expected they would call him?)  
  
“Poor General Organa, though,” begins another, older man. “Her family deserved so much bet -"  
  
Then Rey snatches his arm and gives it a forceful yank. They keep moving, although the muscles of his left leg become stubbornly unresponsive for a moment and he staggers. Rey’s jaw is clenched, her eyes gimlet-sharp, probably in disgust at being forced to touch him.   
  
He cannot fault her for this, either.   
  
_("You're a monster.")_  
  
“...Don’t look back, all right?” Rey advises, when Ben turns his head to hear whatever the man planned on saying next. “That’s not the way you’re supposed to be going.”  
  
...  
  
Ben is not given free reign of D’Qar’s military compound – he’s glad for this, really, because the imposition of routine is far more familiar – but he is permitted to take supervised excursions between the hours of 600 and 700. Visitors may come any time between 800 and 2100 hours. Often it is his mother, or his uncle. Sometimes it is Rey.  
  
_(“We’re still reviewing all that classified intelligence you sent me,”_  she has explained. They cycle together through a game of determining which of Ben’s outspread fingers she is tapping, while he keeps his eyes dutifully closed. This is meant to monitor the healing nerve damage.  _“I put everything onto a holorecorder as I went, which was good because there ended up being over six months of it in total – did you realize that? How long you spent playing spy for us?”_  
  
_“No,”_  he has admitted.  _“Was that the left index just now?”_  
  
_"Nope. Ring finger.")_    
  
He makes the bed each morning and folds his spare uniform atop it, recalling dimly that cluttered spaces always made him feel crowded and distracted as a young child. The only other thing in this cell is an air vent, in a corner eight feet off the ground.   
  
Eventually they will relocate him to some remote world– so long as it’s not Dagobah, thank you, the humidity there is like getting wet tissues jammed up your nose – but just now his mother and uncle are engaged in the tiresome business of putting a galaxy back together amidst the settling dust of a toppled regime. They are getting to be old hands at it.   
  
He also makes daily escorted trips to the refresher, where he undergoes the farcical routine of washing himself while wearing psionic suppression-cuffs. The shower is a cold, open duracrete room with a grated drain in its floor and ten bare spigots curving out from the walls.   
  
This display seems to amuse the guards very much, or one guard in particular. The other man thinks mostly about what their mess hall is serving for lunch – apparently renaming processed meat byproducts with such jovially euphemistic names as “Galactic Surprise” does nothing to improve the taste. Both men stay well outside his reach, like children prodding an animal through the narrow bars of its cage.   
  
This cautionary distance will do them no good, in the event of a Code 5 emergency, but Ben hopes they never need to find this out.  
  
He keeps himself turned towards the shower-head.   
  
( _“Damn,”_  the younger guard thinks, frankly.  _“His body’s even worse than his face.”_ )  
  
It is impossible to guess which scar the man is staring at, although there is a wide assortment to choose from. First there are smaller ones, countless and careless, left behind by the same sorts of erring strikes that tore his black cowl and gouged his helmet. The bowcaster wound on his lower left side is so large both Ben’s hands cannot cover it, while the pair below his collarbone – left by Finn and Rey, respectively – are matched in color and texture like military epaulets. The one Rey ripped into his neck and shoulder with her – his – her lightsaber is large enough to redirect the shower’s falling water like a trench. Snoke's lightning has left branched, fern-leaf patterns along his back and leg, which Ben finds rather aesthetically interesting. 

Why should he not, though? He has done all of this to himself.  
  
_(“I mean, I guess he’d still be weird-looking if you got rid of everything else – maybe that’s the real reason they made him wear a mask. Nobody’d ever take him seriously without it. I sure as hell wouldn’t.”)_  
  
Ben scrubs industrially at his hair, his arms and hands, bemused by his own temporary sense of shame. Oh, dear, someone thinks the Supreme Leader’s favorite attack dog looks peculiar? How very nasty of them.   
  
_(“I wonder why? Holt’s kind of a mangy perv, but he’s definitely right about General Organa still being a very fine specimen of – well. That’s not respectful. And his dad wasn’t a bad-looking guy, either. Is it the will of the Force? So he’s less likely to reproduce and curse the galaxy with another generation of stab-happy Sith Lord fuckery?  
  
May the Force be with you, you big ugly bastard.”)_    
  
The guard laughs quietly, to himself, and his companion grunts at being disturbed from his midday meal ruminations.   
  
“What the hell's so funny?”  
  
“Nothing, nothing. I’ll tell you later.”   
  
Ben leaves the guard to his thoughts, which are entirely his right to have.   
  
He attempts to go several days without showering, after this, but the mingled smells of sweat and scalp remind him too much of what it had been like to breath inside that helmet after a long fight. It was always cramped, to say nothing of how little he could see through its visor – only what was right in front of him, which had of course been the Supreme Leader’s real intention in asking Ben to wear it.  
  
What a shame it had taken him so long to figure that out.   
  
…  
  
Ben emerges from a memory of Snoke –  _they are afraid of you, can’t you see it, your mother and father are afraid of what you may become, what you could become, let me show you_ – to find he has managed to wrest his alusteel bed frame clear off its floor-bolts and hurl it against the far wall. His limbs do not seem to remember this titanic, transportive effort, but he still stands panting and trembling and damp with sweat in the aftermath.

Had he meant to do any of it? Yes, certainly. How much?  
  
As with most episodes, he cannot really decide. But it is done, either way, and so intention does not matter.

“Hey, can Medbay 2 send somebody down here?” Ben hears, from the hallway comm unit. “Crylo Ren’s throwing another temper tantrum, and...Yeah, okay. Thanks. We'll see you in five minutes. ”  
  
Normally this disruption would summon Rey to his cell, sometimes carrying a half-eaten apple or hopping to put on her shoe after being woken from a finally-satisfactory night’s rest. He still broadcasts images and emotions to her at an unwilling, nearly horizontal angle, from clear across the compound, but she is off-world at the moment and he is not her responsibility.  
  
_(“Where’s your pity party today?”_  asks the man who delivers Ben’s food, sometimes.  _“All got better things to do than bend an ear to your sob story, I assume.”_  
  
_“I’m sure,”_  Ben usually answers. _“Are there any utensils to go with this meal, or would you prefer to see my impression of an ape?”)_ _  
_  
A verified Crylo Ren Temper Tantrum appears officially in the new handbook as a Code 3, so although Ben is mostly coherent by now they are still required to slip a needle of sedative through his arm. For reasons of safety, it is explained – to others, mostly. Not to him.  
  
_(“Listen. It feels weird saying this, but, uh."_  
  
Finn had hesitated in the cell's doorway, one hand over its keypad lock in preparation to slam it closed.    
  
_“...I just realized I’ve never thanked you – for not reporting me, remember? When we were in Tuanul, on Jakku. You looked over at me and –”_ Finn had tapped the side of his head  _“—I think you saw something insubordinate happening, up here.”_  
  
Ben had studied the man, remembering the scents of burned flesh and smoldering cloth as he cleaved FN-2187's back open. The jacket appears to have since been mended.   
  
_“It would be more accurate to say I recognized it,”_  he had said.  
  
_“Well, maybe. But thanks either way.”)_  
  
They have switched their preferred sedative to tranquarest nowadays, because Ben has acquired a spectacular tolerance for renatyl and increasing the dosage any further would put him in a coma. The assistant medtech who arrives to administer his injection is a young woman with amber skin, braided black hair, and a malevolent expression quite apart from the quavering distress most of the medical staff members reserve for him.  
  
“Hello, Kylo Ren,” she says, firmly, in what seems to be a well-rehearsed voice. The needle waits slender and graceful between her gloved fingers. “My name is Lin Sella. Does that mean anything to you?”  
  
Ben presents his left arm. “No, I’m afraid not.”  
  
“I didn’t think it would.” She draws a substantially larger-bore needle from her pocket, after a moment, and in one efficient twist has switched the filled syringe between them. “My sister was Commander Korr Sella. How about that?”  
  
Ah. Now he can place her.   
  
Commander Korr Sella was among the dozen or so Resistance officers and representatives who were scheduled to visit Hosnian Prime, carrying his mother’s final written appeal to the Senate, on the day Starkiller was first tested. Ben had felt them all die at once, in a single raised and pandemoniac shout that had cracked his mind from side to side like a mirror, so any individual voices would have been impossible to distinguish.  
  
“Yes,” he says. “I understand.”  
  
Lin Sella keeps her eyes down as she lifts the needle’s angled, venomous mouth against his arm. She brings her other thumb over a stuttering pulse in his wrist.   
  
“My sister was always a great admirer of your mother’s, you know. Ever since we were little girls.” She steadies her hand on the plunger. “I guess she had good reason to be – I don’t know how that woman’s kept herself sane, all these years, knowing a creature like you came out of her body.”  
  
Ben does not shift his gaze from the woman. He clenches his fist, offering her a raised blue-gray vein that runs from his forearm to his bicep and up into his heart.   
  
“I believe she tries to forget about it, mostly.”

The woman sneers.

“I wish it were that easy for everyone."  
  
Then she stabs the needle in, clear to its hub, so hard and viscous that it bleeds and leaves a jaundice-colored bruise. Ben covers this with his sleeve and occasionally presses his fingers against it in the days that follow, pushing down until the pain becomes a high and unbroken note.

He does not let go.  
  
(And in reverential consideration, because Ben has blamed her all these years for things that were his own doing, he avoids his mother's eyes whenever she looks at him.)   
  
…  
  
Ben does not know the officer’s name – does not care to know it – and the man certainly shows no intention of introducing himself. This is just as well, since Ben does not spend a great deal of time looking at the man’s face.  
  
“Tell me something, Kylo Ren – ”  
  
Hips jerk against his back. A sharp, hot pain plows its way up his spine and through his stomach. His arms are both folded, pinned neatly beneath him, and these handcuffs he wears are beginning to chafe something irksome at the skin above his breastbone.

And Ben must pause to breathe, now, to steady himself, because the raging power in his blood surges up like a sea and reminds him he could rend this man apart tendon by tendon without ever once moving his hands – if he wanted to, that is. Which he does not.

(The probation, he reminds himself, the court, the conditions, the standing and spectacular execution – which would not be so bad, by itself, except Ben knows with immovable certainty that Leia would insist upon being present to watch.

He also happens to know, from extensive personal experience, how a human body always fouls itself in the moment after death. A lovely final picture.)  
  
And he can hardly believe this piece of absurdity himself, even as it is happening, so he sincerely doubts anyone would give much credence to his version of things. Why should they?

Besides, he has endured far worse.   
  
Oh well.   
  
“—I heard –” the man pants, his fingers digging into Ben’s still-clothed shoulders as though to push down through the skin and grab bone “—someone told me – getting their mind read, by you, it was like – like a dull - knife, cutting him open.”  
  
“Figuratively speaking,” Ben answers, in the same deep and foggy voice he has possessed since he was eighteen. 

His face is turned to one side against the floor, and so it comes out slightly muffled. He knows the air of placid expertise usually makes them angrier, but he must ponder who could've made such a creative and not at all inapt comparison. Snoke had not entered his mind with a great deal of care, those final years, so Ben can appreciate the analogy.   
  
Had Commander Dameron said it, perhaps? Most likely. Ben had not been very careful with him, either.   
  
_(“Recognize this?”_  Dameron had said, holding the datacard up and almost-grinning as he did.  _“I dug it out of a drawer. I’d completely forgotten I had it – A Record of Hyperspace Travel and Exploration Before the Galactic Empire, Collected in Three Volumes. Didn’t you loan this to me, way back when?"_  
  
_“I may have.”_  Ben had lifted the datacard gingerly between his fingers, recalled only a puling and dark-haired boy of six or so as he followed his conscripted older playmate up through the branches of a Force-tree.  _“Am I to assume you never read it?”)_  
  
There is another searing spike of pain.   
  
Then Ben remembers the interrogation chamber with its cold and shackling chair, remembers watching people turn their heads aside as they wept with fear because it was the only part of their bodies they could move.

Had he enjoyed it? Sometimes, to be sure, especially the ones who mocked and sneered and bared their teeth, as though this would do them any measurable good against him. It was a contest of wills, a breaking of locks, an inquisitive dissection into original parts, a game of strategy not unlike the one he and his uncle played long ago when he was someone else, something else – hold an image steady in your mind, draw it backwards and up and sideways out of the other’s pursuing reach, winding a thread through the vast labyrinth of yourself.

But he had never thought of it in quite this way, this way here, coarse and savage-painful and as foolishly humiliating as crying where others can hear you – which speaks a great deal about matters of perspective, he supposes – and so Ben must think yes, yes, this is a perfectly fitting retribution. This is entirely merited.  
  
So Ben says nothing to the man, after this, and the man says nothing further to him.   
  
“…Hello?” Rey asks, about a week later. “Did you hear what I just said?”  
  
Ben looks up at her.

She perches on a folding stool that she has carried in here so they may eat their morning meals together, while Ben sits on the low bed with his knees bent up around him. He feels something like a quiet knocking at the forefront of his mind, Rey’s usual signal that she would like to be let in, because these days she always asks for his permission before entering.   
  
He recalls her face contorted in pain, her brows stubbornly furrowed, her voice breaking down the middle with effort.  
  
_(“I’m not giving you anything.”  
  
“We’ll see.”)_  

He shuts her out. Courteously, she withdraws.  
  
“No,” Ben tells her, stirring the untouched porridge with his spoon. “Say it again.”  
  
...  
  
He is walking alongside Rey through a lower corridor when he feels it, a bulging pressure at the base of his neck, then Ben turns crisply on his heel just in time to watch the fired blaster-bolt halt itself several inches from his face. It buzzes like an angry hornet, pushing uselessly against the grip his power keeps on it.   
  
The boy, locked into place with his weapon still raised and straining as though against iron chains, is not faring much better.   
  
He is perhaps fourteen or fifteen years of age, with a broad jaw and gray eyes and broom-colored hair that sticks up in the back. Ben recognizes him, although they have never met in person. 

He steps politely around the hovering blaster bolt as if entering late into a private party conversation, pulling his elbow out of Rey’s grasping reach, and notes that four guards at the hall’s far end have not come any closer. The boy’s eyes are innocent-wide.   
  
“You are Lieutenant Cassio Eventide’s son,” Ben pronounces, walking forward until they are within arm’s reach of each other. “Aren’t you?”  
  
The boy flinches. His finger where it holds steady on the trigger has turned so white with frustrated effort that it is beginning to look brittle. The uniform coat he wears is slightly baggy about the shoulders, around the belt, rolled up twice at the sleeve cuffs, clearly tailored to fit a larger man.   
  
“Yes,” the boy gasps. “And you’re Master Kylo Ren. They told me your – your knights were the ones who killed his squad.”  
  
“We were,” Ben answers. "I'm sorry."  
  
"Am I supposed to give a damn?"  
  
Ben had not killed Lieutenant Eventide himself, once he was finished extracting whatever information the Supreme Leader required, but this fact is immaterial. The boy's face had appeared among his father's memories, buried down in the furthest and most secure place inside his orderly mind – it had come as a quick, bright flash between the images of a gray-eyed woman combing her hair, potted flowers in a windowsill, an unfinished cup of caf left forgotten on a ship's console.  
  
“No,” Ben answers.   
  
The boy’s teeth grind together. His thoughts are an incomprehensible, helpless tangle, his nerves like sparks, his vision tightening around him so that he can see only what is directly in front of it. Ben is very familiar with this process.   
  
He takes a half-step backwards.   
  
Behind him, Rey moves a step forward in turn, but Ben nods his head to her and so she stops.   
  
“I’m going to release you now,” Ben says. The boy blinks in surprise. His finger eases off the trigger. “I won’t blame you for whatever happens next, but I’d advise you to be certain you can live with it.”  
  
“I – ”  
  
He lets go gradually, gently, as though relaxing his grip finger by finger, and the boy’s body sags when he does. The blaster bolt continues its harmless path forward to punch a large hole in the duracrete wall, blowing dust and shards and plaster nobody pays the least attention to.   
  
The boy keeps his blaster raised. His arm and chin both tremble. He scowls down the barrel, as he is pulled apart by the terrible and widening gap between ability and desire – then he changes his hold with one efficient flick of the wrist and smashes his gun’s stock across Ben’s right cheek in a wild, swinging backhand. Something cracks like damp kindling.   
  
Rey gives a sharp and wordless exclamation, tries to move forward again.   
  
_(“Wait,”_  Ben tells her, sending out the thought as his ears ring.  _“Please wait.”)_  
  
She does. Nobody else moves.  
  
And with what he would like to imagine is a solemn, sovereign dignity, such as that of a man finally setting his neck down on the executioner's block where it belongs, Ben turns his head aside to offer the unmarked left cheek as well.   
  
“Now, tell the truth,” he says. “Did doing that make any difference?”  
  
The boy pales in humiliation, the blaster now hanging limply from his split-nailed fingers. His spine curls back, all the tendons rise in his neck, his mouth pinches closed as if around the taste of something bitter.   
  
“No,” he answers, finally.  
  
“Good.” Ben straightens his head again. “Then you are already a stronger and wiser man than I am.”  
  
The boy’s next breath turns into a sob, followed by another and another and another. Sobs lift to become wails. His nose begins to run, dribbling mucus down his chin along with the spittle and tears, and Ben decides abruptly that if anyone laughs at this child he is going to snap their neck.  
  
Fortunately, none of the guards do. One comes forward to lay an arm around the boy’s narrow, shaking shoulders.  
  
_(“Why are you weeping?”_  Snoke had asked him, once, because even hidden beneath Kylo Ren’s mask Snoke could always see Ben Solo’s true face. _“Have I not given you strength and surety, as I promised? Have I not given you a purpose?”_

_“You have, Master.”_

_“Then who is it you mourn for, Kylo Ren?”  
  
“No one, Master.”)_  
  
Rey does not take Ben back to his cell immediately, after this. Instead she sits him down atop the counter, in an empty refresher that she ducks them into as they leave the boy’s keening, cleansing cries behind. One of her hands becomes covered in a soft light while she scans it over his rapidly-bruising face.   
  
He has seen her whole body covered in this same light, as well, moments before she took off his Master’s head in one brutal stroke – like killing a ripper-raptor lizard, she'd explained. Same principle. Ben's mind had held Snoke in place while she did it.  
  
For a moment there is only the dripping of a leaky faucet, a clinking of the chains on his handcuffs.   
  
“You didn’t deserve that,” Rey says.  
  
“Yes I did,” Ben answers. “I should count myself fortunate that he elected not to spit in my face.”  
  
“He’s lucky he didn’t. I would’ve choked him with my bare hands.”   
  
The light works its way through his skin, pushing the fractured orbital bone back together – then there is that same insistent, staccato request, passing from her mind to his, but again Ben keeps her out.   
  
It is a skill he'd needed to develop hastily, while trying to shield his thoughts from Snoke during those final stages of the war, although this blocking tended more towards redirection – moving his Master’s increasingly violent entreaties along other channels and pathways, other passages through the labyrinth, away from thoughts of his family and the resistance and the future and usually towards memories of Rey as they fought.   
  
It was the best he could do, considering how keeping Snoke out of his head was not something he had ever really tried before.   
  
“Ben,” he hears Rey persist, “there are some things nobody deserves. All right?”   
  
Ben considers the fact that he is sitting with his back to a mirror, that if he turns around and looks hard enough he will be able to see his father’s features half-hidden inside his own scarred, spoiled face.   
  
_(“Take off that mask. You don’t need it.”_

_“What do you think you’ll see if I do?”_

_“The face of my son.”)_    
  
“That’s true,” Kylo Ren answers.   
  
…  
  
The problem requires a bit of creativity, a bit of suspicion for the impossible, but its answer comes to him at last with the weightless and easy simplicity of a remembered word or the solution to a complicated mathematical equation – the air vent, naturally.

The air vent.   
  
Its grate is held in place by four tiny screws, one at each corner, so Kylo Ren must stand with his eyes closed and his forehead pressed against the wall in concentration while he imagines them unwinding. Delicate, detail-level work was never his specialty, but the grate drops free and Kylo Ren catches it soundlessly before it hits the floor. The time is 2300 hours.   
  
He lays this aside and stretches his mind up through the vent's dark, narrow shaft until it reaches the fan.   
  
One of its curving metal blades, about the length of an index finger, lifts off the mounting as though of its own volition and is guided slowly back out into the light. Its edge is as fine as the point of a new-struck nail.   
  
Kylo Ren has to put this aside too, though, if only temporarily, because his heart starts to thrash like a drowning swimmer inside his rib cage.

It had done this same thing before he led the Knights to massacre Luke’s students, all older than he by several years and all laughably less powerful. It had beat this way before his duel with the former Master Kylo Ren, whose name Ben had taken after he took his life. It had beat this way before he turned to meet his father on the bridge, above a chasm of red light, before he had helped Rey kill the man whose voice had lived coiled up inside his head since he was four or five years old.   
  
Whatever the mind’s position on such matters, the body always resists transition between one life and the next.  
  
But, Kylo Ren tries to reason with it, he can promise that this will be the last time.  
  
(What had brought the change, finally? He knows very well. He had looked into Snoke’s mind, during an idle moment, and glanced his plans for the conclusion of the war – a public execution, of course, General Leia Organa brought to her knees while a crowd looked on.   
  
_“Ha,”_  Kylo Ren had thought, though he had not been Kylo Ren as he thought this and had never really been Kylo Ren at all underneath.  _“My mother will never kneel for them. They’ll have to break her legs first.”_  
  
There, right there. That had been it. That had been where it started, or ended, depending on your definition – his mother, his mother who had never knelt or cried or looked backwards once in all her life, his mother who missed him and wanted him to come home.)   
  
He paces through the bare white cell until his pulse finally slows again.   
  
Really, this should be easy. This should feel effortless, the natural conclusion to whatever cautionary tale of vindictiveness and rage and selfish hubris he has no doubt turned himself into by now. Kylo Ren would prefer it if they not go quite that far, though, when this is finished – it is somewhat dispiriting, when you are at the point of releasing yourself into history and hearsay, to know you will be transformed into the monster parents tell their children about at night.   
  
Well, he concedes.

It will be acceptable so long as they do not come up with something too absurd, like the notion of him actually fitting under a bed well enough to hide there.   
  
He laughs at this summoned mental picture while rolling up both sleeves and exposing the pale skin beneath. This is going to make a great, lashing mess, and no doubt the sanitation workers will curse him for it because blood is so hard to scrub out of cloth and stone. He ought to leave them a note about the virtues of cold water and peroxide.   
  
Then he picks up the fan blade, as carefully though it is a flower stem, and tips it onto its thinnest edge. He has murdered enough men to know where the appropriate arteries are located.  
  
And his hands are steady now, Kylo Ren is pleased to observe. He would hate to slip or waver in this task – it will be the only pure, good, truly just and courageous thing he has ever done as a man.   
  
He must attempt to do it correctly.   
  
_(“I’m being torn apart. I want to be free of this pain. I know what I have to do, but I don’t know if I have the strength to do it. Will you help me?”  
  
“Yes. Anything.”)_    
  
He sighs, long and low.   
  
_(“Thank you.”)_    
  
…


	2. Tecmessa

…

A lifetime spent crawling and climbing and freefalling through the sunless, hollowed-out fragments of history has given Rey a thoroughly utilitarian understanding of where her body begins and ends.

Such midair talent becomes necessary, of course, when three estimated inches can make the difference between trading some rusty voltage regulator for an extra portion or breaking your damn-fool back at the bottom of a ventilation shaft. Rey has squeezed these limbs through coffin-narrow places where she knew nobody would ever find her if she got stuck, hauled these legs up sand dunes that kept eroding away beneath her, driven these muscles through hunger so sharp-fanged it had made her double over, rocked this heart to sleep each night with promises that turned out in the end to be mostly lies. Well, she’d always told herself, you haven’t stopped breathing yet. Every other problem is more or less fixable.

And for all the years she’s spent being a nobody, Rey does have to take a certain pride in her own absolute self-possession.

Still, she can’t decide if this pain – heavy, inert, like lead cooling and hardening inside her bones – properly belongs to her or to him.

Maybe it’s both.

Rey rubs at her face with the heel of one hand and goes back to staring at Ben.

He lies with his head turned aside, his eyes closed, the soft and solemn mouth formed into a vague frown. A sweep of black hair is caught against the shell-colored scar on his face. The deep-bottomed chest slowly rises and sinks. Even sleeping, Rey notes, half-dead besides, he holds himself with the sacred rigor of a duelist about to turn for the first strike.

“Smart move,” she warns, sticking out her legs to cross them at the ankles.  “Be ready, because I’m planning to throttle you with a bedpan when you wake up.”

No answer.

Regulation states that all the medbay rooms must remain at an unfriendly fifteen degrees standard, so she’s gotten an itchy blanket and tossed it over him. The time is 500 hours. Sterile lights overhead turn everything in here to shades of gray, except various neon numbers on the monitoring system – brain wave patterns, oxygen saturation levels, respiratory rate and pulse, a triple-time rhythm that Rey follows with her foot – and this data is punctually logged at fifteen minute intervals. An assistant tech strode in earlier, some dark-haired young woman with a needle full of sedative and advice about how it's usually best to ignore a man’s pity-seeking tantrums. In return, Rey had politely offered to show the woman Darth Vader’s favorite old trick.

Vital signs on the chart all change as they are updated.

It doesn’t tell her anything new, but Rey reads it again anyway: penetrating trauma to the radial and brachial arteries, class four hemorrhage, decompensated hypovolemic shock, total volume loss estimated at around 2.5 liters. She’d once owned a water canteen that held about as much, except she’d never kept it all-the-way full because this made it too heavy to carry on her hip. 

And such extravagant bleeding would’ve killed the average human adult, they’d remarked, or at least killed them much faster.

But not him, naturally.

Rey remembers watching Ben beat a fist against his side to scatter blood across the snow, remembers wondering how he could maneuver so well inside such a big and tiringly solid body. Like a diving bird of prey, she’d thought, those same wild-wheeling motions that seemed reckless and uncontrolled right up until the stunning moment of impact. She remembers hewing him open from shoulder to crown with a sword that burned hotter than the surface of a star, and then seeing him try to stand up again anyway.

He’d stood all during his trial, too, insisted that he stand while they read off the list of his victims. Halfway through, Rey had realized – she’d timed it, checked it against the courtroom’s chronometer – that the symoxin they’d given him for those new cutaneous lightning-strike burns had worn off. She’d watched his back attentively, waiting for him to crumple down into the pain.

Ben hadn’t even wavered.

(About a week after she’d landed on Ahch-To, Rey had finally given the Millennium Falcon a good top-to-bottom shake. Any scavenger with half a brain would’ve done likewise.

 In a storage locker above the relief pilot’s bunk, hidden behind a loose panel, there’d been a small box made from polished orowood; it had contained a woman’s garnet earring, a coarse lock of long reddish hair, two sabacc dice rubbed soft around their edges by somebody’s fingers, feathers and pebbles and datacard books and the empty, powder-light corpse of a moth.

 Atop everything had been a tidy little note. 

_BEN’S STUFF – DO NOT TOUCH!! – TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSSAKEWTED_

Rey had carried this box up the cliff’s tilted steps in both hands, hung there on a rising draft of wind while she imagined a red lightsaber growing through Han’s back, and then had hurled everything out as far as she could into the sea. It plunged three hundred feet to shatter against the heaving surf.

She’d stood there in silence and watched it fall.)

Rey lifts an orange from her pocket.

Finn brought two for her several hours ago, while they were still debriefing the day-shift guards down in Ben’s cell block. He’d told her one of them apparently wanted to report a serious breach of conduct by his fellow officer; the guy looked scared spitless, Finn had added. A complete nervous wreck. Said he would’ve-could’ve-should’ve told Master Kenobi about this earlier, except he thought he might have an easier time explaining it to another man first. Finn had been the one who offered to speak with him.

Now, what could that be about?

Probably nothing, Rey would assume, except Finn hasn’t come back yet.

She jabs a clipped thumbnail through the orange’s rind. The fruit inside smells like a summer morning, but each bite Rey takes has the flat iron taste of rainwater. She chokes it mechanically down.

“I’m saving this other one for you. See?” She waves the second orange tantalizingly above her head. “Finn said you’ll probably be starving once the nerve block wears off. The first thing he did after they pulled him out of his coma was shovel down a three-course breakfast – and he told me to tell you, no hard feelings.”

Again, there is no answer. 

Rey pockets the orange and rolls back the sleeves to her robe. She pauses for a careful inspection of the unmarked skin, shakes her head once, tugs the cuffs down until they cover her palms. That annealing pain in her bones does not go away.

So her foot goes on tapping, tapping, tapping.

 _(“You still refuse to see what I could teach you,”_ Kylo Ren said, once, through the muzzling mask on his face. His saber had snarled in her ear. _“What quaint moral absolutism.”_

 _“You should try it, sometime.”_ Her own blade had leaped up to scorch a new mark in his shrouding black hood. _“It’s useful when you’re dealing with a man in a mask.”_

_“An improvement on creature.”_

He’d swung at her again.

Rey had suddenly recalled Leia’s arms around her, being gathered up into all that warm and dignified sorrow, then had taken this memory and driven it from her mind straight through his like a lance. Kylo Ren – though that wasn’t his real name, she knew, the same way that wasn’t his real face – had staggered as though he’d been struck.

 _“No,”_ she’d answered. _“It’s much worse.”_

When they’d seen each other next, they had been surrounded by mud and icy rain and still-bleeding corpses. Rey had looked up in time to see Kylo Ren thrust his sword through the back of a man who was about to kill her.)

Dropped there on the blanket, Ben’s right hand flickers. Rey pauses until it grows still again.

His index finger sits crooked beside its long companions, the result of either a badly-healed or oft-repeated break. Calluses thicken his thumbs and palms, which tells Rey that the gloves had been mostly for show, and two newly-formed scars now travel up his forearms from elbow to wrist.

They are rough in texture, ropey in appearance. Rey had been somewhat distracted as she pulled the skin together.

She lets out a sputtering grumble and lowers her head to rest atop her clasped knees. Her eyes prickle with fatigue, so she closes them. Inside this private darkness the bright, dactylic report of Ben’s pulse seems to fade and reappear, fade and reappear, like a blinking firefly.

And not everybody had wanted him dead, Rey must consider.

Through the myopic, insectile energy that whipped her along through those weeks leading up to his trial, over all the shouts and clever slogans about needing to put a mad dog down, Rey had managed to hear another line of reasoning.

It went like this:

Show him mercy, they had said. Let him live.

Let him live each day in memory of what he has done, in the company of his ugly rage and his ugly grief and his ugly heart. Let him repent, let him atone, let him accept in penitential silence the burden of our hatred, let him remain down on the knees from which he has lost any right to rise. Let him look into a mirror each day with that ruined face and see his father’s murderer staring back. Let him realize how his mother sees just the same thing; had the corpse itself not been reduced to ash and cinder, let him believe we would’ve nailed it to his spine. Let him discover that nothing he does in the future can ever change or blot out or alter what he has done in the past. Let him accept it into his ill-formed, irreparable mind that he has no further human claims to forgiveness or love or comfort, and that he deserves to die, but then let him live.

He once chose to put on the mask of Kylo Ren, and now he must know he can never-never-never take it off.

_(“That doesn’t – ”_

Rey had stopped herself.

She’d been standing in the courthouse’s preliminary hearing room, the recorded sounds of Ben’s dense voice still echoing off its walls. His spoken confession had come last, following her documented half-year of gathered enemy intelligence: illegal arms-dealing subsidiaries, labor and mining camps in the Unknown Regions, Centralist senators who’d landed themselves in the First Order’s pockets, names and faces and promises which Ben had brought her from the mind he shared with Snoke. It was a marvelous trick, that concealment he’d kept up for so long. Sometimes it had required him to remain awake three days at a time.

The judge had cocked his head to one side, waited for Rey to finish. Midday sunshine slanting in through the room’s high-arched windows had been their only source of light. It made the room too suffocatingly dark and too blindingly white at once.

 _“—Sorry, your honor,”_ she’d said, _“but that doesn’t – I don’t think that’s what mercy’s supposed to be like.”_

 _“Of course not, Master Kenobi. You and I both know the truly merciful thing would be to kill him.”_ His voice had been equable and composed, as though he were addressing a precocious child. _“Death would be a coward’s reprieve, compared to all of that. We’ll have to see if Kylo Ren sees things the same way.”_

_“That’s not his name.”)_

Rey is beginning to float atop an uneasy half-sleep when she feels a spark against the back of her neck, a charge rippling down her arms like the anticipation of a storm. Her eyes open.

She straightens up to find that Ben is staring at her.

 Or glaring at her, to be more precise. He’s glaring at her, his eyes lit from behind with their usual live-nerve concentration – and his mind resembles a nebula on the inside, Rey has observed, chaotic with its own restive light-dark-light potential. Peculiar, but that’s probably why it suits him.

Rey jolts to her feet and ignores him while she pours water from a disposable plastic pitcher. She spills only some of it.

“Where am I?” he asks.

 “Medbay Three.” She lets out a measured sigh. “You cut both your wrists with a fan blade from the air duct. Do you remember doing that?”

“Yes.”

“Good. That means I don’t need to explain it.” Rey offers him the drink. “Your mom’s being evaluated, but I said I’d call as soon as you woke up. Nobody’s restocked our blood collection center since the war ended, so she ordered them to do a direct transfusion – I think they took over a pint, before they made her stop? Maybe more. Then Poe and Snap volunteered to give the rest, since they’re both in our database as universal donors. Poe said his blood was probably two-thirds caf, though, so you might feel a little twitchy for a while.”

Ben doesn’t say anything.

Rey thrusts the too-full glass further towards him. Her lips pinch together. Water trembles around its rim before dripping onto her hand.

But Ben doesn’t reach to accept it. He does not shift his eyes from hers. The machines go on announcing his body’s various gear-grindings and ticks, until an invisible wave like heat cannons past Rey’s head to slam a switch on the wall. Everything in the room goes silent and dim except the emergency lights above his bed. 

She drains the water glass herself in one aggressive pull. It leaves a taste of aluminum shavings on her tongue.

“Great. Now somebody in the control room’s going to think you’re flat-lining.” The glass is slammed down on a fold-out table. She falls back into her chair. “That’d be the second time today I’ve had to start your heart going again. I’m impressed, though – I think I’ve scrapped electrostatic ion thrusters with less firing power than that damn thing.”

The muscles in Ben’s neck glide as he swallows. His voice sounds hoarse and exhausted when he speaks, but his eyes are blurred around their edges; they’d looked this same way after she tore Kylo Ren’s mind up by its roots and told him he was afraid.

“That was not your choice to make,” he says.

Rey clenches two fistfuls of robe. The air around them becomes solid and compact like a magnetic field.

“And you expect me to believe it was yours?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it was a stupid choice, so that’s too damn bad.” Rey glances down at her hands to be certain all the blood is gone from beneath her fingernails. She’d needed to wash them four times.  “Ben, how could you do that? Did you stop to think about what it’d do to your family?”

Ben lets out what might be intended as a harsh, barking laugh, a habit he’d probably developed in tandem with the mask’s distorting vocorder.

“I believe I’ve already done enough damage where my family is concerned.”

“That’s not how your father would’ve wanted you to think.”

“I certainly can’t ask him, now, can I?”

Rey feels her temper rear itself up like a spitting cat, knows this is precisely Ben’s intention. No wonder he’d worn the mask, no wonder he had thought he always needed it; however cruel and superior he likes to sound, he’s never quite managed to keep that heartsick desperation out of his eyes.

“No. But he was part of the reason you – ” she has to reassemble this sentence when it pulls apart inside her head. Her heart feels stupid and sluggish and battering-hard. “After everything you’ve survived, I can’t understand why you would – ”

“I have lived through it.” Ben rips off the white electrodes they have stuck to his neck. One edge of that huge scar on his right shoulder flashes in and out of view. “Survival is an entirely different matter.”

 “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“It wouldn’t, to you.” Then he meets her eyes again and almost smiles, here, which together with the eyes is somehow worse. “You have never allowed anything to break you.”

Rey thinks again of the orowood box, the handwritten note and the feathers and those six-sided dice as the hissing white waves sucked them under. And the haft of her lightsaber – it really had belonged to him, like he’d said, Master Luke had told her so – her lightsaber always felt warm whenever she picked it up, after this, as though somebody else’s hand had been there a second before.

“That’s not fair, Ben,” she says. “That part wasn’t your fault. You were a child. Things happened to you that –”

“Yes, I was a child – and the Supreme Leader could already see the sort of man I would become if left to my own devices. I happened to myself.”

“You can’t possibly believe that. Not completely. He stole your life from you before you’d really gotten a chance to live it.”

“He stole nothing. I relinquished that life to him of my own free will.”

Rey must lock her jaw for a moment to think. Her gaze shifts away from the face she had branded – to satisfy her own rage, to let him know how much she hated him – and settles below his neck.

She’d known about his other scar, of course, the big one that grows all across his back and onto his right leg, although she’d only seen it for the first time several hours ago when they sheared through his blood-soaked clothing: and then only for a moment, before she swung her gaze the other way. Its branching, flowering shape has something to do with capillary veins, which had ruptured beneath his skin as the lightning’s charge raced along them.

(Rey had not seen it strike him, even if she’d heard the thunder and smelt the burning skin, because immediately beforehand Ben’s mind had snapped her high into the air and flung her across the room with about as much caution as he’d once slammed her against a tree.

Snoke had, after all, originally been aiming at her.

The resounding impact when Rey landed had not quite swallowed up his voice.

 _“I believe you have at last lived out your purpose, Master Kylo Ren,”_ Snoke had been saying. _“I have made you what you are – your final lesson should prove an interesting reversal.”_

 _“I expected nothing less, Supreme Leader,”_ she’d heard Ben Solo answer as he rose to his feet, one more time and always one more time. _“But then I will know something else that you don’t.”_

_“Yes, and I suspect you’ll be just as unwelcome amongst the dead as anywhere else.”_

_“We’ll see.”_

 And when Rey stood up again as well, she had not been a Jedi Knight or a student of Master Luke Skywalker or the granddaughter of yet another man who once called himself Ben; she’d been a nobody-scavenger from Jakku with four still-working limbs and a very unforgiving left swing and a sword that burned hotter than the surface of a star in her hand.)

“What more do you require from me, Master Kenobi?” Ben asks.

She stares at him.

“What do you mean?”

The room’s faded light drains all the color from his face, turning it into a series of sharp planes offset by that highborn nose. He has fallen back against the bed in a posture of reposed acceptance, the way he had appeared when Rey found him pressed into a corner of his cell with both ravaged arms held loosely against his chest.

 “What further use would you make of me?” Ben demands.

“I don’t want anything from you. You need to answer that question for yourself.”

“Answer it – as who, precisely? Ben Solo?”

“Yes.”

“I would hardly be able to tell you who that is,” he answers, in the flat and pedantic voice he typically reserves for making jokes. “I haven’t been granted a great deal of time alone together with him.”

“That’s the whole idea, Ben.”

 “I believe that line of thinking risks becoming an exercise in self-excusal.”

“I’m not asking you to excuse yourself. Nobody expects that. I’m asking you to – to – to understand yourself, maybe. And then see what you can do from there.”

“It won’t change anything, I’m sure you’ve realized.” He looks away, briefly. “It would be exquisitely cruel of you to go through all this effort for the sole purpose of easing your own troubled conscience.”

 Unbidden, Rey remembers the boy with his blaster-pistol striking Ben’s unguarded face.

He’d done it in a backhanded motion, the way masters were said to have disciplined their slaves, and then Rey had looked on as Ben – with eerie grace, with a private and inviolable nobility that made her remember he had worn the title of a knight – offered his left cheek in reply. If the boy had wanted to hit him again, he would need to do it with the opened side of his hand.

Rey’s heart curls up around itself in a flinch.

“That’s – that’s not why I – ”

“No? Then what is it? Stoning was an archaic form of punishment in certain cultures. Would everyone be satisfied with that, if they could draw lots for the first cast?” A quick but violent tremor passes through his jaw. “I’d suggest having my tongue removed, but I’m afraid that would make me even drearier company than I already am. Letting them take out my eyes would be more effective.”

(It had been the voices that first woke Rey, at 2305 hours last night.

The shock had thrown her from an unremembered dream and onto the floor. A vase from the shelf had shattered. Water pooled around her, filling the air with a scent of crushed flowers and rotten stems, and there had been a strange, phantom pain all down her arms – though it extended across her palms, too, because his limbs were longer than hers.

She’d staggered to her feet. Any attempts at shutting out the noise had been useless, because Rey had realized in an instant that it was coming from inside her head.

_“—chained to a pillar and whipped better death than he gave his father if he were any sort of man at all cut off his limbs first family deserved so much his body’s even worse than his face a creature like you came out of her like a dull knife cutting you open killed his squad murderer butcher animal creature monster monster you’re a monster the face of my son come home we miss you yes anything Kylo Ren Kylo Ren Kylo Ren Kylo Ren–”)_

 “Stop.” Rey’s hands collect themselves into impotent fists again. “Stop it.”

“I tried, but it seems I wasn’t given leave to do so.” He gives another dead husk of a laugh. “It would’ve been better of you to let me die.”

“Why?” Now her voice becomes a pitched-battle shout. Her face stings as though from a slap. “What could that have possibly solved, Ben?”

Damn him, Rey thinks. Damn him.

Angry, impenetrable, determinedly self-destructive man, a Skywalker all the way down. She could turn away now, Rey knows, and go without another word, let the medbay door slam shut behind her and never look back. She can’t fix this, she can’t, she has tried and tried and tried and is coming to realize that it’s not a technical question of putting pieces back together, and besides it is neither her obligation nor her place to do anything for him at all.

Everyone has already told her as much.

He’s done this to himself, they have emphasized. This was his choice. Regret cannot bring his father back to life. Your sole duty, Master Kenobi, is to serve as a reminder of his own low and savage unworthiness. You must never let him forget what he –

Then Ben closes his eyes, which Rey has always thought should belong to a much older man. He presses his mouth into a thin line, his face tight with the proud effort of failing self-restraint. A stray lock of curling, innocuous hair hangs over his forehead.

“I meant it as a gesture of reconciliation," he says. "I thought you – ”

He must stop for a moment, purse his lips.

“—I thought you would be willing to accept at least that much as an apology.”

Everything within her and around her seems to stop.

As an apology, he’s saying. An apology.

He has laid himself open with the tenderness of a slaughterhouse worker and bled enough for three bodies put together, though he had apparently intended to stay seated upright even as he died, and he had meant it as an apology. Nothing will ever be enough, he certainly understands. Nothing will ever alter the things he has done. Nothing will ever return him to the person he may have become in some past, relinquished life, so all he could offer in recompense was the life and any possible future he still had.

An apology. 

And balanced on a cold, blind pair of scales, it seems to have been a perfectly just decision.

The pain of this knowledge comes at Rey hard like a fist and knocks a hopeless, blank-numb silence through her. This may belong to him as well.

Again, she can’t decide. 

 _(“Ben.”_ She’d run to him over a widening sea of blood, had taken his face in both hands. The shouts and disorder of everyone around them changed to distant echoes. She’d been breathless from her sprint across the compound, her mind hammering open all the locked doors as it cleared a path before her. _“Ben, Ben, Ben, come back.”_

Ben’s eyes had flickered open to regard her with a fading recognition. 

 _“Okay, we can work with that. We can work with that.”_   The light had leapt up through her, fire on a line of blasting powder. For a moment she thought there had been someone else kneeling there at her shoulder, a man in robes with a thin scar over his right eye, but when Rey looked twice he was gone. _“We’re not done yet.”)_

Well, then.

Words haven’t done her any good so far. Rey cannot haggle or barter with despair, which is after all a much better and more experienced rhetorician that she will probably ever be.

Help me, she tries to demand – from herself, naturally, the way she’s always done, whenever she found her shoulders stuck inside a narrow space or when her feet sank out from underneath her, because there has never been anyone else to ask – help me, help me, help me, I don’t know what to do next.

Though what had Ben said, that day in court?

It had been something about justice and mercy Rey had only been half-listening to, as she ran through practical matters about getting him out of the building before a riot broke out. Any aspiring assassins would want to shoot him in the back, she'd been figuring, nobody would have the skill or the imbecilic daring to try anything else. She'd felt so primed for a fight by then that Rey vowed she would twist them in two if they tried. But she'd still managed to hear - 

 _(“Mercy cannot be earned_. _")_

Ah. Yes. 

So Rey reaches over to take one of Ben’s hands.

It feels heavy, weighted by knotty tendons and muscles and bones crossed with old breaks. She carries the hand up towards herself, cradling it in her palm like the bowl of a chalice – this was the hand he’d held up to her face, while he told her she was lonely and afraid – and presses its back against her cheek. His breath hitches, his eyes open in surprise, but Ben makes no effort to pull away.

Rey courteously shuts her own eyes instead so he may allow himself to start crying. The silence that follows this is as long and lifting as the first note of a hymn.

And with great care, Ben Solo folds his fingers over to grasp at her hand in return. His grip is very strong.

Then his mind opens soundlessly, at the most hesitant push from hers, and here is what Rey fumbles to show him:

(Ben at the courthouse window, drenched in afternoon light, raising his hand to greet a child who does not yet know enough to hate him; Ben seated with his eyes closed and palms upturned, mouth twitching as Rey taps their fingers together; Ben inclining his head protectively down over a weeping boy who has just shattered the bones of his face; Ben laid out pale and crumpled-looking while Leia sits at his side, running her left hand through his hair as they ligature the incision over her right radial artery; Ben with the box of worthless keepsakes, the soaring blade-strikes, the immovable disposition that always keeps him standing however many times he is thrown down, Ben with his self-immolating rage and his violence and his guilt who will always be Kylo Ren in some way or another.

And yet.

 _“Okay, so you might not know much about who this Ben Solo man is,”_ Rey thinks, _“but I’m starting to get a rough idea.”_

There is another heavy, leaden press of sorrow, as Rey knows there will continue to be, but then it eases momentarily. For now, that is enough.

 _“I find your excess of faith disturbing,”_ Ben replies. _"Are you no longer intent on crushing my windpipe with a bedpan, then?")_

Rey laughs tiredly, holds the hand tighter.

“Thank you, Ben.”

“I can’t imagine what for,” Ben says, with that scar she has made on his face and the pair he has made on his wrists and another that he bears like a coat of arms upon his back. “Unless you intend for me to decipher that, as well.”

“Now you’re getting the idea.” She opens her eyes, for no other or more particular reason than because she wants to look at him and still can. “Is there anything else you need to tell me?”

He takes a large breath. His chest rises and falls.

“Yes.” He holds her gaze. “But not all at once, if you wouldn’t mind.”

“That’s all right.” She smiles, which accidentally-on purpose brings the very edge of her mouth against the skin of his hand. “We have time.”

…

 _“And who am I that I should not learn wisdom?_  
_Of all men I, whom proof hath taught of late_  
_How so far only should we hate our foes  
_ _As though we soon might love them”_

 _-_ _“Ajax,” by Sophocles_

…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As many of you have already noted, the Ancient Greek play “Ajax” takes place shortly after the Trojan War and is about the suicide of its eponymous tragic hero. After a blind fit of rage that leads him to slaughter what he believes are his fellow soldiers – they are in fact herds of sheep, thanks to an enchantment by the goddess Athena – the great soldier Ajax realizes that he has brought shame upon himself and betrayed his own sense of honor. He also happens to be grieving Achilles, who was his both cousin and his friend, and bearing all the damage that fighting a ten-year conflict leaves behind. As a ritual of purification, Ajax begs permission to go off and bury an artifact he’s won during the war, which is the sword of the late Trojan hero Prince Hector. His officers let him go. 
> 
> And Ajax does bury the sword – with its blade sticking out of the earth, so that he might throw himself upon it. His lover Tecmessa is the first person to find him. 
> 
> This was probably one of the more emotionally exhausting things I’ve ever written, but I wanted to thank the prompter again for it because it made me think long and hard about what Ben Solo’s redemption arc will ask of him. 
> 
> And thank you all for reading, of course.


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